I haven't seen anyone claiming that API prices are subsidized.
At some point (from the very beginning till ~2025Q4) Claude Code's usage limit was so generous that you can get roughly $10~20 (API-price-equivalent) worth of usage out of a $20/mo Pro plan each day (2 * 5h window) - and for good reason, because LLM agentic coding is extremely token-heavy, people simply wouldn't return to Claude Code for the second time if provided usage wasn't generous or every prompt costs you $1. And then Codex started trying to poach Claude Code users by offering even greater limits and constantly resetting everyone's limit in recent months. The API price would have to be 30x operating cost to make this not a subsidy. That would be an extraordinary claim.
The claim that APIs are subsidized is very common.
eg:
Token prices are significantly subsidized and anyone that does any serious work with AI can tell you this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684887
(the claims don't make any sense, but they are widely held)
I’ll note that it’s common and dangerous, in that there’s a generation of engineers who are at risk of leading each-other astray as to the economics and therefore probability distribution of outcomes for some firms that will massively impact their careers.
I think I understand the major reasons for this meme, but I find it really worrying; there were lots of incorrect ‘it’s a bubble’ conversations here in 2012-2015, but I don’t think they had the pervasive nature and “obvious” conclusion that a whole generation of engineering talent should just, you know, leave.
Meanwhile I am hearing rational economic modeling from the companies selling inference; Jensen, (a polished promoter, I grant you) says it really well — token value is increasing radically, in that new models -> better quality, and therefore revenues and utilization are increasing, and therefore contrary to the popular financial and techbro modeling of 2023, things like A100s still cost quite a lot whether hourly or to purchase. (!) Basically the economic value is so strong that it has actually radically extended the life of hardware.
I just hate to imagine like half of the world’s (or US’s) engineering talent quitting, spending ten years afraid, or wrongly convinced of some ‘inevitable’ market outcome. Feels like it will be bad for people’s personal lives, and bad for progress simultaneously.
Yeah, subscriptions used to be extraordinarily generous. I miss those days, but the reinvigoration of open weight models is super exciting.
I'm still playing with the new Qwen3.6 35B and impressed, now DeepSeek v4 drops; with both base and instruction-tuned weights? There goes my weekend :P